Word: nea
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ONCE AGAIN, disgruntled artists are crying "Censorship!" in order to discredit the concept of moral standards in art. Four artists whose grant applications to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were recently rejected have filed a lawsuit against the organization's "decency code," which forbids the funding of works of art and literature that depict homosexuality or the erotic. They claim that the code was the reason for their rejection and that it sets an unconstitutional limit on freedom of expression...
Maybe, but the staff utterly misses the point of the NEA controversy. The real questions go something like this: Why did Mapplethorpe, ndependently wealthy, free-spending and high-living, need an NEA grant in the first place? And, should taxpayers' money fund projects that taxpayers don't like or want...
WOULD the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fund Mozart? Given the precedent of the Mapplethorpe-Helms conflagration, we cannot be sure. Would Tipper Gore push for labeling copies of Mozart canons...
While Mozart's "licking" lyrics are racy, they do not take away from the composer's other works. We hope the NEA would fund Mozart, because his work is not exclusively devoted to what a Harvard music librarian called an "innocent, juvenile preoccupation with bodily functions." What should matter in the NEA grant process is artistic merit, not adherence by an artist to strict community standards or a particular moral structure in his or her privately financed works...
Visible at Harvard attests to the capacity of universities to provide alternatives to mainstream galleries and museums. The exhibits of actual works, a feature of museums and galleries, usually depend on the NEA and/or corporations to cover enormous insurance and shipping costs. The use of two slide projectors for Visible is a creative solution to the problem that the university is not free from the political/economic constraints of the Reagan-Bush era. Many of the individuals who participated in this project did so because its organization and format are a critique of "blockbuster exhibitions" often compromised in terms of content...